| This is great logic. "Sure, my house is valuable now, but if I could also walk to a grocery store, a barbershop, a coffee shop, an electronics store, a beer pub, a few restaurants, and a few other kinds of stores, AND get on public transportation that would take me to local hubs and office spaces -- surely my house would drop value like crazy then!". Greater logic: people looking to rent a small, inexpensive apartment are clearly the same people looking to buy a house with a backyard, so increasing the supply of the former would decrease prices for the latter by the law of supply and demand. Exploding brain logic: ignoring property values going up every time the subway/local rail starts expansion into an area. Also voting against public transport expansion because nobody is using it anyway. AND also voting against constructing dense housing, because it will increase traffic. Note that all three are required to block mixed-used dense walkable developments on the premise of "my property value" --- and that all three currently apply to the Bay Area. |
In many cities, the logic of opposing transit is pretty explicitly racist. In Atlanta, I would hear MARTA derided as being only for black people, and in Baltimore's suburbs in 2018 there was a stink from suburbanites who live on the light rail route complaining that the train was "bringing in crime".